Pubdate: 1900
Source: THE REIGN OF LAW - A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS
Author: James Lane Allen
Publisher: The Macmillan Company
Pages: 3-5

THE REIGN OF LAW

HEMP

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold,
freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of
hemp - with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear
ancestral Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with
wife, child, flock in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured
forth for water, salt, game, tillage - in the very summer of that
wild daylight ride of Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which,
my children, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as
the pitching of a rocking-horse in a boy's nursery - on that history-making
twelfth of August, of the year 1782, when these two backwoods
riflemen, during that same Revolution the Kentuckians then fighting
a branch of that same British army, rushed out of Bryan's Station
for the rousing of the settlements and the saving of the West
- hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls of the fort.

Hemp in Kentucky in 1782 - early landmark in the history of
the soil, of the people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin
and clearing solely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet
and shirt. By and by not for cabin and clearing only; not for
tow-homespun, fur-clad Kentucky alone. To the north had begun
the building of ships, American ships for American commerce, for
American arms, for a nation which Nature had herself created and
had distinguished as a sea-faring race. To the south had begun
the raising of cotton. As the great period of shipbuilding went
on - greatest during the twenty years or more ending in 1860;
as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-bailing went
on - never so great before as that in that same year - the two
parts of the nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying
between them, to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the
nation's hemp. It was in those days of the North that the Constitution
was rigged with Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on
the other, for a patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown,
home-prepared fibre; and thanks to the latter, before those days
ended with the outbreak of the Civil War, the country had become
second to Great Britain alone in her ocean craft, and but little
behind that mistress of the seas. So that in response to this
double demand for hemp on the American ship and hemp on the southern
plantation, at the close of that period of national history on
land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky, in the year
1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of the well-cleaned
bast.